An intelligent, evocative, and richly textured memoir.
The haunting account of how the author tried to escape her rural Indiana past.
Ink + Lead Literary Services owner Palm (Please Do Not Remove: A Collection Celebrating Vermont Literature and Libraries, 2014) grew up in a community claimed from the waters of the Kankakee River, which had been rerouted to create farmland. Early on she realized that she was not like other blue-collar “rural folk” whose lives entwined with the land; rather, she was a “bookish fishergirl who longed for the social opportunities of a cookie-cutter subdivision.” Unable to move past the narrow confines of her social and physical isolation, Palm first sought refuge in religion. She experimented with both Christian and non-Christian faiths and belief systems; eventually, meditation became her one reliable way “out of that riverbed.” While the author embraced the power of her mind and imagination to rise above an existence measured by cycles of flood and drought, fellow outsider—and secret object of desire—Corey sank into the “rot” of riverine life by “rejecting school and authority” and becoming a convicted murderer. Deeply troubled by Corey’s descent into criminality but determined to break free of the muddy quicksand of river life, Palm, whose own uncle had been imprisoned for attempted murder, went to college and studied criminal justice. Her path took her first to Indianapolis and then, after marriage, to Vermont. Yet despite the distance she put between her riverbed upbringing and the trauma of Corey’s lifetime incarceration, both remained with her. Only after she was able to return to Indiana to visit Corey in prison could she make peace with her past and a heart that, according to her corresponding palm line, looked like “an aerial cartography of the river where we grew up.” Densely symbolic, unsentimental, and eloquent, Palm’s book explores the connections between yearning, desire, and homecoming with subtlety and lucidity. The result is a narrative that maps the complex relationships that exist between individual identity and place.
An intelligent, evocative, and richly textured memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-746-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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